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By Root 914 0

thought, No, there’s no way this guy covered Radiohead. This must be a different “Kid A.” But there was his acoustic guitar muting the rhythm of “Kid A.” And there, in just the places where the voice of Radiohead’s “Kid A” kicked in, he started singing. Oh man, I thought, this guy just doesn’t get it. Now, I’ve got nothing against John Mayer and I’m not interested in being a snob about rock music. He seems like a perfectly nice guy and I genuinely think he loves what he does (which is more than I can say for many artists). And, in a way, he did me a favor. Because as soon as I realized that this was indeed Radiohead’s “Kid A,” I took the opportunity to listen intently and try to figure out what the lyrics were saying. As Mayer told MTV, he covered the song in order to bring out the lyrics and melody:

There’s a tune there, but it was almost purposefully obscured, like a robot was singing it. It was one of the few songs I could do something with—if you’re gonna do a cover, leave the song somewhere different than where you picked it up. (March 17th, 2004, MTV.com)

But it’s also good not to leave a knife plunged into the song. I could hardly pay attention to the lyrics, overshadowed as they were by the clash between the two renditions. Think Dylan’s (or even The Byrd’s) “Mr. Tambourine Man” compared to William Shatner’s stilted and clueless performance. Who’s the real robot here?

The clash suggested to me a kind of spectrum with which to make Heideggerian sense of Radiohead’s conundrum—an axis between understanding plain-spoken words articulated by Mayer (or Shatner) at one end, and being able to understand by not being able to hear the words that are not articulated, at the other. And it lets me articulate (!) why the original is so much more effective than Mayer’s cover.

Kid A is an album that at once shows us how popular rock music can point us toward the synthetic, technological textures of our lives that we’ve come to depend on while at the same time enacting how we have come to accommodate the dangers and anxieties that such dependencies produce. It’s popular music that reconfigures what we consider popular not in terms of fashion or trend, but in terms of what we use in order to connect fashions and trends. It asks popular music to start thinking about how we rally around our (globalized) culture. How does the circuitry that brings us together also breed alienation? How can popular music think through this? The result is often panicky music, shaking with anxiety, and nearly cyborg-like in its depiction of humanity. The title track of Kid A, if at all meant to be emblematic of the album, and by extension, the new direction the band took at the time, seems, to me, to suggest that, while there are no easy solutions, the attempt to think through these issues means risking not making sense—and that risk is becoming more and more a daily requirement.

John Mayer’s cover seems to work as a comforting moment in an otherwise difficult existence. Sure, I hear the words articulated. But do I understand what is being said? This is where I find Radiohead’s original more (and ironically so) comforting: the risk of trying to make sense means as much to me (perhaps more) than any sense made. I admire the will to face the technological saturation of our cultural moment and to try not only to make sense out of it, but to make it sing. Kid A, it seems to me, does just that. It shakes us out of our ordinary dependencies and shows us the risks we take on a daily level. It’s not always easy to hear that, and often requires that we listen to the layers around us. It asks us to listen not just to the songs, but to the fact that there are people and technologies at work in the background who have produced those songs—and that there is a whole other life withdrawn from what we ordinarily hear. Our responsibility is not only to listen, but to understand. And that’s not easy. But it can be beautiful.

17.

Why a Rock Band in a Desolate Time?

MATTHEW LAMPERT

In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced